Samuel J. LeFrak, Master of Mass Housing, Dies at 85

Published: April 17, 2003

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When Mr. LeFrak started working for the family company full time in 1940 it was building Army camps and housing. His father, who had bought a 2,000-acre farm in Brooklyn in the 1920's and had been building there long before World War II, turned the presidency of the company over to him in 1948. He held it until 1975, when his son, Richard LeFrak, became president, with Mr. LeFrak holding the title of chairman.

In the early 60's, when housing production in New York exploded before a more restrictive zoning law went into effect, the Lefrak Organization built ''an apartment every 18 minutes,'' said Arthur Klein, the company's chief financial officer. Lefrak used its own labor force or contractors who worked only for the organization, farming out only contracts for heating, ventilation and air-conditioning. It also bought and stockpiled material by the carload.

In Forest Hills, Queens, he built the New England Quadrangle for 1,000 families. In Flatbush, Prospect Park West, Forest Hills, Sunnyside and Elmhurst he built apartment buildings named for states: the Alabama, Illinois, Nebraska, Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut, among others. When he ran low on states, he chose the names of leading colleges for his buildings -- the Harvard, the Princeton, the Dartmouth. He also favored presidents. Among those so honored were George Washington, John Adams, James Madison and Abraham Lincoln.

At first he expressed contempt for the Mitchell-Lama program on the ground that he needed no governmental help to build housing. ''I've got 45,000 apartments and they pay enough rent to give me enough money to build without any help from anyone,'' he would say. In the end, however, he did build housing under the Mitchell-Lama program, which provided bond financing and lowered taxes to make new housing affordable for middle-income people.

No one doubted the single-minded tenacity that Mr. LeFrak brought to real-estate development, or his devotion to his idea of what the rental housing product should offer. It took four years, he said, for him to reach agreement with the trustees of the William Waldorf Astor estate on the $6 million sale price of the 40 acres of central Queens property that became Lefrak City. What he created there might be considered the in-city rental answer to Levittown on Long Island, the famous large-scale single-family housing development that was also named for its developer, William Levitt.

The site of Lefrak City, like other sites Mr. LeFrak chose for development, was well situated for commuting. ''If we lived here, Daddy, you'd be home now,'' trumpeted a sign along the car-choked Long Island Expressway. In time everyone in New York knew the LeFrak name and the idea was copied by many places around the country.

In his later years, Mr. LeFrak turned to other business ventures: oil and gas exploration through the Lefrak Oil and Gas Organization, a drilling company, and the entertainment business, through Lefrak Entertainment Company, which develops and produces popular records and buys and leases out the performance rights to popular songs.

He also built a formidable art collection, which included paintings by Delacroix, Daumier, Renoir, Monet, Picasso, Pissarro and others.

He had more offbeat interests as well. He financed expeditions in underwater archaeology, at one time in search of seventh-century Byzantine shipwrecks off the coast of Israel. He also helped finance a search for Noah's Ark, a failure when the Turkish government withheld permits to explore Mount Ararat. More successful was his financial aid to the search team that found the Titanic in its Atlantic grave.

He was also a major philanthropist and the landscape is dotted with his endowed buildings that are named for him and his wife, the former Ethel Stone, whom he married in 1941. They include a concert hall at Queens College; a gymnasium at Amherst College; a meadow in Flushing, a sculpture terrace and art gallery at the Guggenheim Museum, a learning center at Temple Emanu-El, and a classroom building with an amphitheater at the University of Maryland.

In addition to his wife and son, Mr. LeFrak is survived by three daughters, Denise LeFrak Calicchio, Francine LeFrak Friedberg and Jacqueline LeFrak Kosinski, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

To them, Mr. LeFrak often repeated what his parents had told him: just be smart and never get caught overleveraged.